Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham and Hanna Reitsch had nerve to spare, but left very different legacies

Amelia Earhart, Beryl Markham and Hanna Reitsch were very different women. But they shared a taste for airplanes, an aversion to being told what women could or couldn’t do, and considerably more nerve than most people.

Earhart became the most famous of the three, and almost 90 years after she disappeared somewhere over the Pacific, people are still looking for her.

An expedition backed by Purdue Research Foundation and the Archaeological Legacy Institute is preparing to travel to Nikumaroro, a remote, uninhabited atoll in the central Pacific. The theory is that Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan may have made it there after failing to find Howland Island. In the lagoon is an anomaly that may, optimists suggest, be part of Earhart’s missing Lockheed Electra.

Maybe it is and maybe it isn’t. Earhart has been generating tantalizing clues for nearly nine decades, none of which has yet managed the inconvenient task of actually solving the mystery.

Born in Kansas in 1897, Earhart caught the flying bug in 1920 and earned her pilot’s licence three years later. This was an era when aviation was still sufficiently novel and dangerous that its leading practitioners became international celebrities. Charles Lindbergh was the most famous of them all, but Earhart gave him a run for his money.

In 1932, she became the first woman, and only the second person, to fly solo nonstop across the Atlantic. Leaving Newfoundland, she intended to fly to Paris. But bad weather and mechanical problems intervened, and she landed in a field in Northern Ireland just under 15 hours later.

That she missed Paris hardly mattered. She’d crossed the Atlantic alone.

Earhart was also more than a celebrity adventurer. She worked at Purdue University as a career counsellor for women and adviser to its aeronautical engineering department. Purdue’s research foundation helped finance the specially equipped Electra she called her “Flying Laboratory.”

In 1937, Earhart and Noonan set out to circumnavigate the globe. On July 2, they left New Guinea for Howland Island, a tiny speck in the central Pacific. They never arrived.

The conventional explanation is that, unable to find Howland, they eventually ran out of fuel and crashed into the ocean. But doubts have persisted ever since. Hence the latest expedition.

Earhart, though, had no monopoly on nerve.

Born in England in 1902 to Charles and Clara Clutterbuck, Beryl Markham grew up in colonial Kenya. Horses were her first passion, but airplanes eventually claimed their share. After getting her pilot’s licence in the early 1930s, she became a bush pilot, flying over vast stretches of East Africa where emergency landing strips weren’t exactly plentiful.

Then, in 1936, she took on the Atlantic.

Flying from England, Markham became the first woman to cross the Atlantic solo from east to west, the considerably more difficult direction because of the prevailing winds. She encountered atrocious weather, flew through the night and eventually suffered engine trouble.

Like Earhart, she didn’t quite make her intended destination. New York was the objective. A bog at Baleine Cove, Nova Scotia, was the reality. Still, if you’re going to miss New York, crossing the Atlantic alone before doing so provides a fairly substantial consolation prize.

Markham was also memorable away from airplanes. Blonde, tall and striking, she inhabited the famously freewheeling world of Kenya’s Happy Valley set. Three marriages failed to contain her romantic enthusiasm, and her lovers reportedly included Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, son of King George V.

Buckingham Palace was not amused.

Then there was Hanna Reitsch.

Born in Germany in 1912, she became one of the country’s leading test pilots, flew some of the most experimental aircraft of the period and was the first woman to fly a helicopter. Testing the rocket-powered Messerschmitt Me 163 nearly killed her. She suffered serious injuries, recovered and went back to flying.

Whatever else one might say about Hanna Reitsch, physical courage wasn’t in short supply.

Unfortunately, neither was her enthusiasm for Adolf Hitler.

In April 1945, with the Third Reich collapsing and the Red Army closing in, Reitsch made a perilous flight into besieged Berlin and spent two days in Hitler’s bunker. She regretted not dying there with her Führer, but left by air while Berlin disintegrated around her.

Reitsch survived the war and eventually resumed flying, setting records and enjoying a reasonably distinguished postwar aviation career.

Whatever their differences, none was easily deterred. Flying the Atlantic solo or negotiating an improvised 1945 Berlin airstrip weren’t activities for the faint of heart.

Mind you, determination and courage don’t necessarily make one wise.

Troy Media columnist Pat Murphy casts a history buff’s eye at the goings-on in our world. Never cynical – well, perhaps a little bit.